Names for Love by Patrick Deeley; The Stylized City: New and Selected Poems by John F.Deane; An Crann Faoi Bláth: The Flowering Tree; Contemporary Irish Poetry with VerseTranslations by Declan Kiberd; Gabriel Fitzmaurice; Irish Poetry of Faith and Doubt: The ColdHeaven by John F. DeaneReview by: Peter DenmanIrish University Review, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 1991), pp. 373-374Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484445 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

Patrick Deeley, Names for Love, Dublin: The Dedalus Press, 1990. 68

pages. IR?7.50 (IRE4.95 paper).

John F. Deane, The Stylized City: New and Selected Poems. Dublin: The Dedalus Press, 1991.120 pages. IR?8.95 (IR?5.95 paper). Dec?an Kiberd and Gabriel Fitzmaurice (editors), An Crann Faoi Bl?th: The Flowering Tree; Contemporary Irish Poetry with Verse Translations. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1991. 310 pages. IR?20.00

(IR?9.95 paper). John F. Deane (editor), Irish Poetry of Faith and Doubt: The Cold

Heaven. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1990.192 pages. IR?8.95 paper.

Anyone who enjoyed Patrick Deeley's assured first collection, Inti mate Strangers, will find here more of the same, continuing particu

larly some of the concerns in the first part of that book. The

presiding tension in his poems arises from a contrast between the

repetitious present of the workday and domesticity, and remembered moments of a childhood spent in the country where adults lived a

life to which he has not succeeded. The image of the woodcutter,

working in and into his material, occurs frequently, and the poems do at times have something of the rough static quality of woodcuts;

they tend to evoke and present an instant without quite knowing what to do with it once evoked. He relies too much on the assumption that the poem will speak for itself, when in fact it needs some

further coaching in its lines.

I'll be tempted to enquire after the health

of ancients who gently haunted

my childhood. Whereupon this sternum-ache, bereavement

in my breast, will stir again, and I will hold my tongue.

("Going Back")

There is too much effort here to avoid the well-worn "heartache".

Deeley can write effectively, but he needs to surprise a reader more.

To be a poet of the obvious one has to write supremely well.

The Stylized City offers selections from four earlier collections by John F. Deane, with revisions, and twenty-nine new poems. The

stylized city is the heavenly city of Revelation, and is the culminat

ing image at the end of a section of poems on religious or heavenly themes, prompted by visits to the Siena of St Catherine and to the

Moscow of the cosmonauts. The visionary city becomes stylized in

art, seen in a rose window but also in the poem framed by John F.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Deane, homonym of John the Divine. This poem acts as a bridge to

the final section of poems, set on Achill Island, which are for the most part poems of recovered or discovered peace.

The Flowering Tree is a good selection of twentieth-century poems in Irish with translations into English, given a generous introduction

by Dec?an Kiberd. It includes writers from ? Dire?in to Ni Ghlinn and others. This anthology is presumably intended to be introductory and informative, but the notes on individual writers are less than

helpful; some are downright silly. We are told that Art ? Maolfabhail has published "two acclaimed collections of poetry" but are given the name of neither; that Michael Hartnett's first book in English "was acclaimed" but are not told the names of any of his Irish books; that Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill "has published two highly acclaimed collections" but again, no names; there is more accla

mation than information. It was judged necessary that we should know that Maire Mhac an tSaoi worked on preparing an English Irish Dictionary, and that Eoghan ? Tuarisc "was the first of the

Aosd?na members to die" (!) but not that we should be given details of their publishing careers. We are repeatedly told that a con

tributor is a "poet", when as much might have been divined from her or his inclusion in the book.

The Irish poems "of Faith and Doubt" gathered in The Cold Heaven are drawn from the last 170 years or so, but the nineteenth

century is thinly represented ? too much faith and not enough doubt,

in public utterance at least. It is, of course, religious faith and doubt

that are in question, and the subject is interpreted with a lati tudinarian scope, and there seems to be a lot of poems about priests and churches. Deane explains that it was not his intention to gather devotional pieces, but poems about the hesitations in belief as

epitomised in the Yeats poem that gives the book its title. This is the sort of book that must have seemed like a good idea at the

outset, but the result belies the promise. The subject matter is too

partial to throw much light on an individual poet, and one does not

get any sense of a larger tradition of spiritual verse.

PETER DENMAN

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